NTSB Report Offers Legal 'Roadmap' for Plaintiffs in PG&E Lawsuit

None of the findings contained in the 12-page on the deadly Sept. 9 pipeline blast released on Tuesday will ever see the light of day in open court.

But NTSB report, which offers a less than flattering portrayal of PG&E’s role in the massive explosion that left eight people dead and 38 homes destroyed, points to legal strategies the plaintiffs will likely use in their .

“It provides a good roadmap for how the litigation will be focused,” said Frank Pitre, an attorney who’s representing 53 of the more than 300 claims filed against PG&E.

The report itself documents a series of blunders and, at best, a blasé attitude by PG&E toward public safety that spanned seven decades, starting with the installation of a faulty weld on the seam of Line 132 in 1956 that eventually burst, and continuing to when it took 95 minutes to shut down the gas that fueled the explosion. In between, there were years of inadequate inspections.

The report is inadmissible in court, meaning plaintiffs' attorneys will have to do their own legwork to establish the findings that would figure to be damaging to the utility in a civil case.

“It was an across the board organizational systematic failure,” Pitre said of the picture the NTSB report painted of PG&E, one that he said he and others already knew.

“The dysfunction of the PG&E culture that allowed a series of failures to exist for over 50 years, starting from the defective weld being placed in the ground when the defect was observable to the naked eye, all the way through maintenance and inspection, procedures that were fully lacking in any integrity, and finally by the emergency response,” Pitre said.

Two leading infrastructure engineering experts who’ve followed the case closely praised the NTSB for its candor in the report.

“It was refreshing that the committee came out and placed blame where blame was due, usually committees are very circumspect in cases like this,” said Theo Theofanous, an engineering professor and the director of the Center for Risk Studies and Safety at UC Santa Barbara. “I didn’t learn anything new from the report, but there was nothing expected to be learned because there’s so much said about it.”

Bob Bea, an engineering professor at UC Berkeley, said he learned from Tuesday’s report that the San Bruno blast more closely mirrored similar gas pipe explosions in San Francisco in 1981 and Rancho Cordova in 2008 than he’d previously realized—a revelation he said was troublesome.

“The same systemic elements were present in excess of three decades,” he said.

“I found that startling and discouraging,” he said.

The NTSB also got plaudits from Theofanous and Bea for issuing 29 recommendations to prevent similar incidents. However, both expressed concerns that the recommendations will be fully implemented.

Despite PG&E’s public pledge to improve its pipeline safety in the aftermath of the explosion in the Crestmoor neighborhood, Bea said the company’s track record over the last few decades has left him dubious of the company’s promises.

Bea said he’s concerned that, left to their own devices, companies with shoddy performance records such as PG&E’s could put gas pipeline safety in many parts of the nation at risk.

“There’s very little enthusiasm or leadership to affect significant structural reform in how we’re approaching this very challenging problem,” Bea said.

PG&E did not respond to a request for comments on this story. However, company spokesman Brian Swanson told Patch shortly after the NTSB report was released on Tuesday that his company is committed to strictly complying with the NTSB’s conclusions.

“We will adopt all of (the NTSB’s) safety recommendations,” Swanson said. “At the end of the day, it is our pipeline and it is our responsibility to operate that pipeline safely.”

PG&E in a press release issued shortly after the NTSB report pledged to “continue to support the City of San Bruno and the victims of the accident and their families as they heal and rebuild.”

Mike Danko, an attorney who also is representing plaintiffs in the case against PG&E, said that the company’s rhetoric is not consistent with the way it has treated his clients over the past year.

“It’s consistent with the weasel-words,” Danko said. “In the initial answer to the complaint they blamed the victims for the explosion, and then after that hit the press and they filed an amended answer saying, ‘This is to make clear that safety is our number one priority and we’re not blaming the victims,’ and then the complaint goes on to blame the victims.”

Pitre said that his clients aren’t motivated entirely by the pursuit of compensation, and that they want answers to questions that weren’t addressed in the NTSB report.

“They want to know how many times the PG&E executives made choices to place profits over safety,” he said. “They want to know who those people are and they want to know why they made those decisions.”

Pitre, who grew up in San Bruno, acknowledged the case is personal for him.

The alum’s fiery voice quivers with some heat when he talks about how the explosion destroyed neighborhoods he rode his bicycle around in when he was a kid.

“If have my say in it, we want all those corporate executives who were involved in those decisions to forfeit all of their executive bonuses and put them back into this community so all the improvements that the NTSB has called for can be paid for out of the pockets of the corporate executives and not the ratepayers," he said.

“It’s not just about money. It’s about changing and correcting behavior and exposing the truth by having people identify who made those decisions, and making sure that those people are never placed in similar positions again.”

A hearing is scheduled for Thursday in Redwood City to set a possible trial date for the residents' lawsuits filed against PG&E for the explosion. The lawsuits involve a total of 92 cases and 323 plaintiffs, according to a joint case management conference statement filed in San Mateo County Superior Court.

The plaintiffs are asking the court to adopt a litigation schedule and set a trial date, according to a legal brief filed with the court by the plaintiffs' lawyers on Monday.

Lawyers for both sides have submitted briefs regarding trial structure.

The plaintiffs' attorneys are lobbying for a structure that would address liability and damages collectively by presenting bellwether cases—select cases that are representative of the group's claims.

The court, however, indicated in a June 30 hearing that it was inclined to proceed with a consolidated trial that would address the issue of liability first, then allow mediation with plaintiffs to determine the amount of any damages PG&E would pay.

The plaintiffs' attorneys argue that the latter approach would result in a lack of transparency, as settlements would be made behind closed doors.

Bay City News Service contributed to this story.